The blockchain revolution: Change, barriers and the future landscape

HSBC, Standard Chartered, Bank of China, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale and UBS, among many others, are looking to blockchain technology help speed up, simplify and reduce risk in the $16 trillion in global trade done annually.

Banks hope the decentralised nature of the technology, which draws on and verifies information from thousands of different sources, will eliminate vast piles of paper documents and unlock up to $2 billion in extra financing business within eight years

Dave Locke, Field CTO at World Wide Technology has been working in close conjunction with Dell Technologies to develop an open sourced blockchain technology for seamless integration into the IT infrastructure across banks.

In this article, he discusses:

The uptake of blockchain technology by companies around the world will see a huge shift in the way every sector does business, much like the monumental shift from paper to online in the business world.

The lack of scalability and the energy-consuming mechanisms of blockchain technology have been the biggest deterrents to mass adoption.

How can these issues be overcome and what does the future of blockchain integration look like?

How will blockchain change and impact different industries moving forward?

My personal view is that blockchain is going to create a fundamental shift in the way some business processes are executed globally; whether it’s settlement and payments or claims in the financial services world, whether it’s banking or insurance, whether in the retail space or even the pharmaceutical space.

There’s a huge push around using blockchain help secure supply chains and also ensure providence of goods in terms of where they’ve come from; whether that’s an egg from a chicken or it’s a piece of meat all the way through to pharmaceuticals that have been made offshore, while avoiding the whole fake goods culture that is impacting that business.